Blog of the Week: McClatchyLiberal-to-progressive news
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Lost Writings of SDS..
Revolutionary Youth the the New Working Class: The Praxis Papers, the Port Authority Statement, the RYM Documents and other Lost Writings of SDS
Edited by Carl Davidson 
Changemaker, 273pp, $22.50
For the full contents, click the link and view 'Preview' under the cover graphic.
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By Randy Shannon, CCDS
choice "Everyone has the right to work, to free of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment."
- United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 10, 1948
I. Introduction
The "Great Recession" that began in 2007 has caused the greatest percent of job losses since the Great Depression of 1929. This crisis is the end of an era of unrestrained 'neo-liberal' capitalism that became public policy during the Reagan administration. The crisis marks a new level of instability with the growth of a global financial elite that targeted US workers and our trade unions after World War II.
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Order Our
Full Employment Booklets
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...In a new and updated 2nd Edition
Capitalism may well collapse under its own excesses, but what would one propose to replace it? Margaret Thatcher's mantra was TINA...There Is No Alternative. David Schweickart's vision of "Economic Democracy" proposes a serious alternative. Even more fundamentally, it opens the door to thinking about alternatives. His may or may not turn out to be the definitive "successor system," but he is a leader in breaking out of the box. |
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Quick Links...
CCDS Discussion
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Planet of Slums
by Mike Davis
Verso
Paperback
List Price: $19.95
Our Price: $8.00
Buy Now
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Carl Davidson's Latest Book:
New Paths to Socialism
Essays on Mondragon, Marx, Gramsci and the Green and Solidarity Economies |
Solidarity Economy:What It's All About
Edited by Jenna Allard, Carl Davidson and Julie Matthaei
Buy it here...
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An Invitation to CCDSers and Friends...
 Racism Emerges
Big Time in 2012
Primary Campaigns
We're the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism...Do you have friends who should see this? Pass it on...Do you have a blog of your own? Others you love to read every day? Well, this is a place where you can share access to them with the rest of your comrades. Just pick your greatest hits for the week and send them to us at carld717@gmail.com!
Most of all, it's urgent that you oppose austerity, make solidarity with the Occupy! movement and end the wars! We're doing more than ever, and have big plans. So pay your dues, make a donation and become a sustainer. Do it Now! Check the link at the bottom...
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Newt Gingrich and What Black People Need:
Intellectualizing Racism
By Dr. Anthony Asadullah Samad, PhD
BlackCommentator.com
Over the last few weeks, Republican Party Presidential Nominee, Newt Gingrich, has found a way to make himself relevant again. Not to the Republican Party, because are trying to find a way to sink him. Newt has become relevant to the always dysfunctional (and uncomfortable) race discourse in this nation.
This time around Newt is trying to explain the class divide in America by constructing an hypothesis around who attracts wealth and who doesn't, and why. Newt says Blacks and Latinos don't understand how to attract wealth. He says Asians do.
Newt suggests that it is somehow a racial work ethics problem and if blacks would just let go of welfare, their lives would change forever. Really?? This follows his analysis - if you can call it that - around how black men can find work by simply picking up a broom. Newt has a skewed perspective on race. Always have. And he has this thing about wealth being tied to black people. Welfare is not a "black thang" or a "Latino thang."
Whites statistically have more people receiving welfare, but Blacks and Latinos have a greater percentage of recipients per their percentage in the population. That's how he gets away with that. Newt knows that welfare resonates with the struggling middle class in this country. This time around, instead of attacking people on welfare - his tact to suggest how people can get off welfare while assailing President Obama as the "Welfare President." Newt is quick with it, and he is slick with it. He has made an art of trying to intellectualize racism...for political advantage, of course....(Click title for more)
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The Future of Black Politics
By Michael C. Dawson
Boston Review
This article is part of The Future of Black Politics, a forum on the power and potential of black movements.
People who live at the bottom of the social order, especially at the bottom of more than one of its hierarchies, are frequently condemned to a life of crippling disadvantage. The existence of such mutually reinforcing power hierarchies calls the social order itself into question as a matter of justice. Political movements need to disrupt these hierarchies to overcome injustice.
In the United States, a healthy black politics is indispensable to that task. Black politics-African Americans' ability to mobilize, influence policy, demand accountability from government officials, participate in American political discourse, and ultimately offer a democratic alternative to the status quo-have at times formed the leading edge of American democratic and progressive movements; black visions were some of the more robust, egalitarian, and expansive American democratic visions. This status has been lost.
The decline of progressive black politics is apparent in the Occupy actions that have swept the country to protest economic injustice. There has been black participation, and in some areas, such as Chicago, black efforts to mobilize communities have been aided by the presence of a local Occupy movement. But, for the most part, Occupy has been divorced from black politics.
Yet both today's black communities and black political traditions have much to offer Occupy and progressives at large. Blacks are more supportive than any other group of Americans of state action to redistribute wealth and bring about a more equal and just society. A National Journal poll released last October found that 84 percent of blacks support a surtax on people earning more than $1 million per year, compared to 68 percent support overall. They are also the strongest opponents of U.S. military intervention: blacks opposed the 2003 intervention in Iraq at far higher rates than did any other group, including Democrats. Black progressive traditions have long offered a more just and democratic vision than is usually found in American political discourse. Ida B. Wells, Marcus Garvey, William Monroe Trotter, Hubert Harrison, A. Philip Randolph, Cyril Briggs, and W. E. B. Du Bois are just a few of the many activist-theoreticians (they tended to be both) who led movements dedicated to fighting for racial justice and in most cases offered a broad vision of social and economic justice as well.
Today there is a disconnect between black organizing and other mobilizations on behalf of labor, suffrage, and radical economic reform. Even worse, the black civil society that in the past supported flourishing black activism is today weaker than it was for most of the twentieth century. Without a mobilized black politics, American democracy is even more vulnerable to internal attacks by those who have been openly suspicious of mass democratic movements for decades.... (Click title for more)
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Teaching Tucson: Now Books Are 'Illegals' Too!
 More National Groups Demand Release of Detained Books, As Teachers Adopt Banned Mexican American Studies
By Jeff Biggers
Huffington Post
From the high plains of Wyoming to the urban centers of Atlanta, Chicago and New York City, hundreds of schools launched a historic teach-in movement today to incorporate lesson plans from the banished Mexican American Studies program in Tucson in their own classrooms.
Organized by the Teacher Activist Groups and joined by Rethinking Schools and other educational networks, the month-long "No History is Illegal" initiative comes on the heels of an unusually strong statement by over two dozen of the nation's largest publishing, literary and education organizations that calls on the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) and Arizona state education officials to recognize First Amendment rights and "return all books to classrooms and remove all restrictions on ideas that can be addressed in class."
Thousands of detained books remain behind lock and key in the school district's warehouse like broken chairs and desks and school bus parts, despite the fact that the TUSD library catalog shows that there are less than 2-3 copies of several of the removed Mexican American Studies textbooks in the entire school district, which serves more than 55,000 students.
In outrage at the detained books, nearly 15,000 people have also signed a petition started by former Mexican American Studies teacher Norma Gonzalez, which calls on the Tucson school district to "immediately remove these books from their 'district storage facility' and make them available in each school's library. Knowledge cannot be boxed off and carried away from students who want to learn!" ...(Click title for more)
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Why OWS Needs to Denounce Violent Tactics
Ongoing Debate: Occupy is not an armed conflict - it's a PR war. And images of violence undermine the movement.
By Tina Dupuy
Alternet.org
Jan 31, 2012 - The Occupy Movement, "the 99 percent," has, ironically, been hijacked by a small minority within its ranks. I speak of a small percentage of Occupiers who are okay with property destruction. As we saw in Oakland over the weekend: They're okay with breaking windows, trashing city buildings and throwing bottles at the police. In short: They are not nonviolent. They are willing to commit petty criminal acts masked as a political statement.
These are Black Bloc tactics and they're historically ineffective at spurring change. The now Gingrich-vilified Saul Alinsky in 1970 said the Weather Underground (the terrorist wing of the anti-war movement) should be on the Establishment's payroll. "Because they are strengthening the Establishment," said the "professional radical" Alinsky. Nothing kneecapped the call for the war to end quicker than buildings being bombed in solidarity with pacifist sentiments.
Here's the key point: Occupy is not an armed conflict - it's a PR war. Nonviolent struggle is a PR war. Gandhi had embedded journalists on his Salt March. He wasn't a saint. That was a consciously cultivated media image. He used the press and its power to gain sympathy for his cause. What he didn't do is say he was nonviolent "unless the cops are d*cks," a sentiment voiced at Occupy. Nonviolent struggle has nothing to do with how the cops react. In actual nonviolent movements they welcome police overreaction because it helps the cause they're fighting for.
At some General Assemblies this issue is referred to as "diversity of tactics." It means basically if you're not okay with property damage, but if someone else is, you're not going to stand in the way. To a liberal ear it sounds like affirmative action or tolerance. It sounds like diversity of opinion - it's not. It's 3,000 people peacefully marching and two *ssholes breaking windows; which becomes 3,000 people breaking some windows in news reports. (Click title for more)
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Timuel Black: Both a Historian
- and Part of Civil Rights History
 BY MAUDLYNE IHEJIRIKA
Chicago Sun-Times
Feb 1, 2012 - Historian Timuel Black's cozy, Hyde Park apartment is a little emptier after some 250 boxes of memorabilia - papers, photos, recordings, a jazz collection - were willed to future generations via Chicago's public library.
But none of it really left. Nearly a century's worth, it is still there in the keen mind and memory of the man.
"My mother and father were sharecroppers, their parents, slaves. They brought my sister and brother and me to Chicago a month after its race riots, in August 1919. We were part of the first Great Migration," says the educator, author, political and civil rights activist, elder statesman and griot of Chicago's black community.
"My parents and others who fled the South came not only to get a better job, make more money, and get a better education for their children. They came to be able to talk back and fight back if they were attacked."
Born Dec. 7, 1918, in Birmingham, Ala., Black was raised in Chicago's then Black Belt, graduating from an integrated Burke Elementary School, then an all-black DuSable High School in 1935, where classmates included Johnson Publishing Co. founder John H. Johnson, and the soon to be famous jazz musician Nat King Cole.
It was during the Depression, and Black would work various jobs after high school, until Pearl Harbor launched America's entry into World War II and he was drafted into a segregated U.S. Army in 1943. Of many stories from his two-year tour of duty, a poignant one is his visit to the liberated Buchenwald Concentration Camp in '44.
"The horror was indescribable. I kept thinking, 'This is what happened to my people during slavery,' " he says.
Black returned to civilian life with militant political views. An organizer in labor and social justice movements of the '40s and '50s, he worked with activists Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois.
He helped establish the Congress of Racial Equality and United Packinghouse Workers of America, among more than 100 organizations he was to be active in over seven decades. His first marriage, in 1947, lasted 10 years, and produced a daughter, Ermetra Black, of the south suburbs, and a son, Timuel Kerrigan, an acclaimed musician. His son, who was gay, died of AIDS at age 29.
A second marriage lasted another 10 years; and he's been married 31 years to current wife Zenobia Johnson-Black.
"I can still walk from where I live today to every house I ever lived in," brags Black, whose memoir with co-author Susan Klonsky, Sacred Ground: The Chicago Streets of Timuel Black, will be released this fall. Black's "sacred ground" is the South Side. ...(Click title for more)
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Quietly Radical Mission at Sundance:
Supporting Native Filmmakers
 | | Bird Runningwater |
By Jamilah King
Colorlines
Jan 20 2012 - It's days before the Sundance Film Festival and Aurora Guerrero is busy. The 40-year-old filmmaker is set to debut her first feature-length project "Mosquita y Mari" at the festival in Park City, Utah, on Saturday, but it's Wednesday and she finds herself in Los Angeles preparing to get in front of the camera for a television spot on up-and-coming filmmakers to watch.
It's not exactly a standard Hollywood story. Her independent film is a teenage love story between two Chicana best friends who grow up in South East Los Angeles' vibrant immigrant community. It relied largely on a grassroots funding campaign to raise money for production. But those facts have helped to lock in her place on the year's indy film radar. When asked if there's any one person who helped make all of it happen, she doesn't hesitate.
"Bird," Guerrero says. "Bird Runningwater."
Bird, it turns out, is the director of Native American and Indigenous Programs at the Sundance Institute. In that capacity, and along with program manager Owl Johnson, Bird oversees NativeLabs, an innovative fellowship program that works with indigenous screenwriters and directors to help produce and show work that isn't easy to see elsewhere.
Guerrero recounts Bird's steady and persistent guidance. He helped mentor her through re-writing drafts of her script, which was over a decade in the making. And when it was time to go into post-production, it was Bird who nominated her for a prestigious TimeWarner fellowship to help carry the film across the finish line.
"He's been behind a lot of indigenous filmmakers of color who are saying something different through contemporary cinema," Guerrero says about Bird.
In an industry that struggles to include even more visible communities of color, like black actors and directors, indigenous artists often find it difficult to get support for their work. ...(Click title for more)
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New Album from Leonard Cohen: Old Ideas
 By Douglas Hesselgrave
Paste Magazine
Anyone who was hoping that Old Ideas, the long-awaited new studio album from Leonard Cohen would reveal a poet who finally realized that the glass might be half full after all, will be sorely disappointed with these 10 new songs.
The rest of us who harbor no such expectations or illusions are in for a treat as the Montreal singer's newest collection is-hands down-his best studio album since I'm Your Man came out in 1988.
 | | LEONARD COHEN - DARKNESS |
A self-described "manual for living with defeat," Old Ideas is a Leviticus and Deuteronomy of suggestions of atonement for carnal error and misplaced faith that puts to rest any idea that Cohen has mellowed with age. Though his "days may be few" as he sings on "Darkness"-the closest thing to a radio-friendly hit that Old Ideas has to offer-Cohen proves that he's not ready to go down yet as he delves into each of these new songs with a ferocity and focus that has been missing in his work in recent years.
The imagery, situations and gravelly voiced assessments of love, life and moral frailty which inform songs such as "Amen" and "Show me the Place" prove that he's still at the top of his game as he tirelessly exhumes relics from the wastelands of the human heart and soul that most of us would rather forget or lack the nerve to explore in the first place.
As in all of Cohen's music and poetry, the apocalyptic situations the singer describes in Old Ideas are counterbalanced by pronouncements of faith and the kind of gallows humor that Dante might have enjoyed while taking a break from writing the Inferno. When he sings "I'd love to speak with Leonard, he's a sportsman and a shepherd, he's a lazy bastard living in a suit" as he does on "Going Home," it's easy to laugh, but it's not the kind of laugh that comes from enjoying a free and willowy life; rather it's the uneasy chuckle that comes just before the roller coaster flies off the rails. ...(Click title for more)
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Become a CCDS member today!
 The
time is long past for 'Lone Rangers'. Being a socialist by your self is
no fun and doesn't help much. Join CCDS today--$36 regular, $48
household and $18 youth.
Better yet, beome a sustainer at $20 per month,
and we'll send you a copy of Jack O'Dell's new book, 'Climbing Jacobs
Ladder,' drawing on the lessons of the movement in the South in the
1950s and 1960s.
Solidarity, Carl Davidson, CCDS |
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